Talk:Christian sororities

Multi-Cultural Sororities

Thanks @Jax MN for all your help with this article. Given your experience with the subject matter, what's your take on whether the multi-cultural expansion list? As a reader with zero familiarity with the subject, I'm not sure why they're distinct from the main list. Do you think an intro line on the main list would help or is it something folks would generally know? Thanks either way Star Mississippi 16:57, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate your continuing interest, and thanks for the kudos. As I look for websites and other clues to populate the Emphasis and Type columns, I'm also working on language for the lede, as a clarification. At the same time you were writing I was exploring some of this in the next Talk section, below. I know this description of the three types to be true, but am looking for a reference that may be cited. The language is a delicate issue too: The moment I would use "traditional" to describe one set of these sororities, another would object that they have as much right to that word. And while many of these are "social", to this subset of collegians, that word may imply something less-pure than how they want to appear. Language... I have something in mind that won't offend, using the phrase "with guardrails" as below. Jax MN (talk) 17:17, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi! Yes, your answer largely mind read my question. Wonderful.

I think this distinction is helpful: both in what distinguishes them from one another and / or the broader collection of fraternity & sororities. It also follows some of the social changes in the US in the 20th century so the extra context is helpful. Does the specificity of which denomination convey more information? Star Mississippi 20:13, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

Hi Star. I forgot to answer a point you raised. Here, we could create a column for denomination, and some would find that interesting. My sense, after reading many website descriptions, is that execution would be a problem. As an example, placing a word like "Methodist" in a column, still, its meaning would be unclear. The current Methodist church itself has several branches. A Century and a half ago, it was the springboard for the First and Second Great Awakening, which was a fervent time of evangelism and piety. Today, some branches of the Methodist church appear more secular, even left-leaning to observers, while southern districts may be more devout. Then, a big part of Black churches adhere to the AME branch of the Methodists. So many choices: I've read that there may be 20,000 distinct sects of the various religions of the world, and no pun intended, but the devil is in the details. It appears that the recent multicultural Christian sororities are broadly-speaking Evangelical, while the older Christian sororities were formed out of mainline churches like the Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists. The newest grouping (visionary pastors, et al) seem to be personality-based missionary churches. We could limit these descriptive words to a dozen or so groupings like I have just done, but I suspect the list would constantly be a target for helpful edits where one group seeks to add words that show they are more fervent than the next. Just thinking as I type.

We could also include the Catholic fraternities and sororities here, just looking at this as a categorization exercise. But they conference with the NIC and NPC, not as a "Christian" organization per se. Do we then add the Jewish groups to make this a "Religious" list, and the Muslim fraternity and sorority? Others? It seems our Project group has, at this juncture, opted to defer to the organizations themselves to understand how THEY caucus with each other. Or if they operate independently. Then we simply record the results. I hope I answered your question fully. Jax MN (talk) 05:17, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

You did, super helpful. It's complex. I think the way you have treated the table is very user-friendly, which is what we all want. I think there's probably an article for why there's some overlap in Christian and Jewish membership, but this isn't that article. The Wesleyan Kappa Phi article is fascinating. Wish more of the sourcing was online (for personal reading. Star Mississippi 23:45, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Table creation and categories

I'm working on the table, regarding what columns to include, to aid in sorting.

I had to include Christian as the first item, even though these groups all claim a Christian mission. Thus this fact is redundant, in a way. (I had a manager proofread a training document once. He said, "I want you to bold everything, and italicize everything, and underline these words." --I showed him the before-and-after, and explained that when you bold and italicize everything you merely are changing the font. Hence, in such a document, NOTHING is bolded, and NOTHING is italicized, defeating one's very purpose of somehow enhancing emphasis. It's the same thing here: The entire category is "Christian", so it is redundant to include that word. But doing so will avoid many, many 'helpful' edits, often anonymous, saying "Oh, unlike these others, we're the Christian ones."

Three big groupings seem to be coalescing. The first are the traditional, collegiate organizations which are primarily social but with added guardrails on their programming that add specific Christian or sect-based functions like bible studies, a morals chair, or certain overtly religious themes in their initiation rituals. These are all integrated (racially) but not devoutly multicultural. These groups typically conference with the NPC sororities. The second group are primarily non-collegiate, multicultural (almost exclusively Black as opposed to Hispanic or Asian), and more recently formed, which all seem to most closely follow the model of the Divine nine Black-Greek organizations, adding a Christian focus. These often feature Step shows, hand signs (also used by some of the traditional sororities), and elaborate, embroidered satin jackets. Like the Divine nine, they are notable for bridging the gap between collegians and graduates, and may have both collegiate and non-collegiate chapters. Their trade association may be the United Council of Christian Fraternities and Sororities (UCCFS), but some operate independently. A third group, also non-collegiate, independent groups, appears to be groups formed by a persistent, visible "visionary" founder, operating as an outreach mission and often with a singular purpose (teen pregnancy support, networking, or simply proselytizing are three examples.) These may also accrue a fundraising or revenue benefit to the founder(s), who may be a pastor, motivational speaker or self-help counselor. This founder's role is absent in the first two types of Christian sororities.

Hence, the two descriptive categories that appear to work best are:
Emphasis - Christian, and their affinity. Are they primarily social (with guardrails?) Is their most obvious characteristic to be multicultural?
Type - used to distinguish Collegiate and Non-collegiate

I'm working to complete the table with these columns, and will revise if a better solution appears. References link back to national websites where available. Not Facebook or instagram sites, following a general Wikipedia guideline: Wikipedia is NOT a directory; the reference links to national websites merely help prove existence.

Finally, note, some of these Redlinked groups have previously had articles, but which have been deleted because of lack of notability, or lack of external references. Wikipedia is not a place to publish essays about how wonderful a group is, or to plagiarize the same content off of a group's national website. These articles may be rewritten with new, summarized content and with valid references. The Fraternity and Sorority Project supports inclusion if a 'national' has installed three or more chapters and can provide independent, valid citations showing existence. Local chapters of short tenure have a much harder time proving notability. Jax MN (talk) 17:09, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

holy crap that table is amazing - and so much more than I was even dreaming of when I pinged you for formatting help.

I wondered also if this article might not be a place to merge some of the non notable (per AfD, no value judgement on my end) orgs? Star Mississippi 20:23, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

The Fraternity and Sorority Project keeps a watchlist of all groups that use Greek Letter names, along with various coalitions and trade groups that have been established to support them. Some are redlinks, and articles offered for them have either not been written or have been deleted. Typically these deletions have occurred when the text is an obvious copright violation or when the article has no valid citations. So this is a work in progress. As we (project participants) work on them, as has been done here, we list those groups that carry a Greek name and have at least a marginal affinity for that particular category. The Christian fraternity (fraternities and sororities) page should also be provided some of the same intro language (on my list of to-dos), and needs some table updates. We don't have such a list for co-ed groups, a smaller subset, which ought to be clarified as a section of the Christian fraternities page.

There certainly are groups that don't fit easily into any of these categories, like the non-collegiate military fraternities and sororities. An eventual page could list them.

We've found that tracking these names helps ensure clarity where there is name similarity. (We track 42 DAB pages at this writing, where there is naming ambiguity.) This also allows us to propose potential non-ambiguous article names. We've developed a consistent naming syntax that has proven helpful.

Practically speaking, we've not encountered resistance in simply listing the names of these tertiary, perhaps non notable groups on these lists. There is far more, and reasonable, resistance when articles are offered for the non notable groups. This is where we fall back to our standardized interpretation of WP rules on notability, which we've clarified for our purposes here (notability rules). Thus there is a methodology, open to discussion and improvement. Jax MN (talk) 22:14, 6 April 2022 (UTC)